MOCA TALKS with Edward Wong: A Family's Reckoning with China

$10 General Admission | $5 Student & Senior | Free for MOCA Members

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) cordially invites you to a special conversation with Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China. The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, D.C., Wong grew up among family secrets, especially those surrounding his father Yook Kearn Wong, who served in Mao’s People’s Liberation Army before making a perilous escape to Hong Kong in 1962. As Beijing bureau chief, Wong retraced elements of that past while examining the forces behind a resurgent China: intensified nationalism under President Xi Jinping, ethnic conflict in Xinjiang and Tibet, and pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong.

This program will also highlight the history of southern Chinese migration to the United States, especially from Taishan County in Guangdong, and the enduring transnational ties among Chinese migrants. By connecting geopolitics with family memory and community networks, the talk will show how cross-Pacific migration continues to shape Chinese American life today.

About Edward Wong

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China. The book received the inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize from the Asia Society in New York and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the U.K. It was named by The Washington Post as a top non-fiction book of 2024 and by The Atlantic as a top summer read. Edward has reported for the Times for 27 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Edward was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. While writing his book, he was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Edward was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team of finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. He received the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University in 2024 for diplomatic reporting. Edward graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and from U.C. Berkeley with joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies. He has received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury Language Schools. He speaks on global affairs on television, radio, and podcasts.

About At the Edge of Empire

The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he made plans for a desperate escape to Hong Kong.

When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father’s mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation’s astounding economic boom and global expansion—and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father’s footsteps, he witnessed ethnic struggles in Xinjiang and Tibet and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And he had an insider’s view of the world’s two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads.

Wong tells a moving chronicle of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into a new authoritarian age transforming the world. A groundbreaking book, At the Edge of Empire is the essential work for understanding China today.

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